Three passionate female travelers have stepped into a global need to make organizing trips for family members and friends a whole lot simpler.
The female founders of the new group travel app, Let’s Jetty (Source: Let’s Jetty)
Group travel planning has long elicited strong reactions. Travelers (not so) fortunate to be tapped as “trip coordinator” may see themselves in the Conde Nast article “Does Anyone Actually Enjoy Group Travel?“. Editors weighed in with their responses, some noting the level of compromise and patience required to agree on dates and a destination, coordinate plans, respect each other’s unique personalities and interests, and still be speaking at the end of the trip. While opinions varied, the main theme was clear: planning a group trip, and planning it well as a group, impacted whether the experience would be enjoyable or even one travelers would be likely to partake in.
They have a valid point, as one or two individuals in a group typically end up doing most of the work involved in planning a successful trip. It is a painstaking process at best and becomes more stressful when coordinators must make bookings and reservations, keep track of expenses, and in general make everyone else happy. Yet, despite these hurdles, 78% of people agree that traveling is more fun with a buddy.
The big picture? There remains a strong desire to travel with others. This is especially true of millennials, as roughly 60% would rather spend money on experiences.
However, actually planning that travel adventure has become so difficult that they are discouraged or prevented from taking trips they desperately want to go on. Wendy Diep, co-founder and CEO of Let’s Jetty, agrees. “The challenges go way past minor inconveniences,” she emphasizes. “They have become major barriers that hold us back from sharing authentic experiences and building genuine connections with others through group travel.”
Diep and her Let’s Jetty co-founders, Suzie Chudzik (Chief Product & Growth Officer), Nicole Martinez (Chief Design Officer), and Tyler Palma (Chief Technology Officer), are millennials and avid group travelers, and they understand the frustrations in planning group trips. Inspired by their personal experiences and backgrounds in consumer technology working at companies such as Amazon amongst others, they set out to create a solution. To really understand the issue on a deeper level, they first surveyed and talked to hundreds of travelers and launched a successful Kickstarter campaign for market validation.
Let’s Jetty manages your travel details in one place (Source: Let’s Jetty)
Chudzik explains, “We discovered that due to the pandemic and remote working, people really value quality time for human connection. They want to strengthen existing bonds or even lay foundations for new ones, and they see travel as one of the best ways to make that happen. We decided to build a group travel platform that enables people to come together and share experiences on a deeper level.”
With the launch of the Let’s Jetty open beta, travelers now have one centralized place for coordinating group travel plans. They can access their initial set of trip planning features, including invites with deadlines and RSVPs, easy-to-create surveys to gather travel preferences, and message boards for posting ideas on trip destinations, places to stay, and things to do. And of course, there’s the shared group itinerary that keeps everyone on the same page. Individuals can sign up and access the beta by going to letsjetty.com and can even choose to save it to their phone as an app.
Let’s Jetty is unique in that it does not focus solely on bookings and reservations. Instead, its platform addresses the social interactions in trip planning and accounts for different travel-planning personality types and the many ways trips can be planned.
“There are always going to be the ‘organizers’ of the group, the opinionated non-planners, and all the in-betweens. We intentionally designed our platform to give people flexibility in the different ways different travelers plan trips, and we aim to make it as easy for them as possible,” says Martinez, who’s spent her career specializing in product, branding, and visual design at companies like Backcountry.com and Overstock, and who was previously also an adjunct professor teaching UX/UI at Utah Valley University. Their app is already gaining traction among a particular group of users – the bachelorette demographic – with a considerable portion of its trips being organized for bachelorette celebrations. “I’m excited to plan my bestie’s bachelorette. As an avid traveler and designated planner, my OCD is thriving for Let’s Jetty,” said one beta user.
What also sets Let’s Jetty apart from its competitors is its unwavering commitment to a female-centric design and user experience. It is notable that over 80% of travel planning decisions are attributed to women, with 84% of travel advisors in the U.S. also women. Let’s Jetty’s founders, who are female, have a nuanced understanding of their travel preferences and priorities, which permeates every aspect of their currently live beta.
Let’s Jetty’s co-founding team is continuing to analyze the market and believes their niche will expand beyond what’s been done before with group travel planning apps. They’re connecting and discussing partnerships with travel planners, believing there’s potential for an opportunity there.
Chudzik reveals that Let’s Jetty is also conducting usability testing and meeting with travel creators who are leveraging the app to host and organize curated trips for social media followers or interest-based communities. This is a particularly interesting opportunity for Millennial and Gen-Z travelers, who prefer these types of trips over traditional tour groups, as they may share similar travel styles and interests and seek more community and alignment on group trips. Lauren Cosby, a travel creator in a community of book lovers @ohtheplacesyouread, has said, “I’m planning my entire retreat on Let’s Jetty because it’s easy to navigate, keeps every piece of information in one place, and also the design is so aesthetically pleasing.”
Diep says, “While Let’s Jetty is still in beta, we’re really excited about the feedback we’re getting from our users. As group leisure travel continues to grow in popularity, there are so many opportunities for our platform. Ultimately, we envision Let’s Jetty becoming an end-to-end platform through which different types of travelers and travel planners can connect and seamlessly create personalized travel experiences together. We have some exciting plans for our roadmap that we believe will completely change the game for group travelers and make the whole experience as easy and fun as it should be.”
Let’s Jetty’s beta is now live. To learn more, sign up for access to it and stay updated on announcements, please visit letsjetty.com.
